Abstract

Mental illness is a growing issue for communities all around the world (“Mental Health Statistics”), particularly for adolescents. As more people are affected by mental illness it is increasingly important for our society to be more educated on mental health. In the past and in the present, the stigma surrounding mental illness has led to people not seeking treatment. According to the Center for Disease Control, only twenty-five percent of adults with symptoms of mental illness believe that people are caring or sympathetic to sufferers of mental illness ("Stigma of Mental Illness"). In order to increase the number of people who seek treatment, it is important for this belief to spread. By reading literature that dives beneath the stigma surrounding illnesses such as depression and posttraumatic stress disorder, communities can be educated and sufferers of mental illness can feel understood and accepted. As a result, understanding the techniques used by authors to portray mental illness is important to producing more works that address this issue. This essay will address this through the following question:

How do the methods used to characterise mental illness in The Catcher in the Rye and Speak compare and contrast?

The Catcher in the Rye and Speak are both novels with first person narration and a teenage protagonist who seems to suffer from depression. Techniques such as the use of language relating to a range of motifs are used by both authors to characterise their protagonists’ illnesses. The aim of this essay is to determine to what extent the techniques are alike and what effect they have on the portrayal of mental illnesses such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.